It’s time for another quick review round-up, even though I haven’t written much, as I don’t have much in the pipe for a while. Mostly fiction this time.
On the personal front, I’ve changed day jobs, I’m working on my master’s thesis, and I have a new baby. It’s busy, but I don’t think that’s forever. My writing output may tick back up in the next couple years.
AESciFi.ca suffered a major hacker attack in late 2016 that shelved the site and so I have not written for the magazine in three years. However, I did put as much time as I could spare, along with several other old and new friends of AE, to getting the operation up and running again.
The bulk of the time was put in last summer, when I was waiting to begin my master’s program and had time for a passion project. I prepped media materials, did some editing and writing, helped with some simple user-testing of the new site, and co-planned the relaunch with the core team.
Then for a time not a lot seemed to happen. In fact a lot of hard work was going on behind the scenes, from our tech guru setting up the back-end of the site to the slush pile team poring through hundreds and hundreds of story submissions. In late June of this year suddenly we were 99% ready for the return of the magazine and it was time for me to contribute again.
I was wrapping up the academic year at the school I work at, and beginning work on the literature review for my master’s thesis research, since I didn’t have any summer courses to take. Fortunately I had some time and flexibility in my schedule to contribute again. For two or three weeks we were marking off items on the pre-launch checklist and getting ready for liftoff, and then, on July 10, it happened.
I have an essay in the relaunch issue, about sports in science fiction. By all means, feel free to read it. But I’m frankly more proud of the issue itself and, indeed, the the fact we managed to launch it–from editing stories and non-fiction pieces, to sending out press releases and tweets and the email newsletter, and coordinating all of the above. It’s a great magazine, and I’m excited to have it back in operation, but it’s actually pretty special to have been a part of making it happen.
My discretionary time is very limited and will be for the next year or two, but even as I’m stepping back from most writing outside of my academic program, one of the few things I will reserve a bit of time for is the occasional fun essay or book review at AESciFi.
To close off, I was interviewed by a podcast on behalf of the magazine back in the late fall and it has now been published. The total interview is about 20 minutes but has been broken into three bite-sized parts:
Part 1: https://lancerkind.com/podcast/050-introducing-aescifi-magazine/
Part 2: https://lancerkind.com/podcast/051-joel-boyce-aescifi-feature-writer/
Part 3: https://lancerkind.com/podcast/052-ae-canadian-science-fiction-review/
Here are the reviews I’ve written for the Winnipeg Free Press since the last round-up. Fourteen of them! (Actually I’ve written 16, but one hasn’t been published yet and one actually seems to have disappeared into the ether, so I’m going to look into it later.) This time I thought maybe I’d order them from best to worst (in my own subjective opinion).
I generally don’t choose to accept a review assignment if I don’t have some reason to think the book could be good, but I do take risks with new authors and subject matter, which may or may not pay off and yes, there were a few duds, with the bottom three being particularly weak. But let’s focus on the positive and highlight some of the stand-outs.
I’ve become a fan of Cixin Liu, a literary giant in his native China, but new to the English-reading world, and after the success of the Three-Body series on our side of the pond, American publishers are combing through his back-list to keep the momentum going. I’ve reviewed two titles in translation over the last couple of years and both stuck with me, but I rank Ball Lightning (which I read last fall) much higher than Supernova Era (read this spring but not listed below since the review won’t come out until closer to the novel’s publication in October). Both are rather grim, truth be told, but the former turned it to better literary purpose, perhaps because the latter was written in an earlier stage of Liu’s career.
Starlight is Richard Wagamese’s final, technically unfinished novel (though it falls only a chapter short). Wagamese was one of Canada’s Indigenous literary luminaries, and it’s my first time reading this author who was unfortunately taken too soon.
Cory Doctorow is an old favourite of mine, but while I’ve rarely been disappointed, Radicalized surprised me with its impact and with how politically on-point it is, which is particularly difficult with a collection of four novellas rather than a single, cohesive novel. Four urgent stories about our present moment of crisis. Doctorow, as always, is best read fresh, so don’t leave it on your nightstand too long.
Well, it’s time for that bienneial update post that is becoming tradition. In 2017 I noted that I had been busy with graduate studies, new parenthood, and a move from the classroom into school leadership. At the time I had recently finished my academic program, which was at the post-baccalaureate level, but now I am back in the academy, working on my master’s degree.
I have at least crested the steepest part of the learning curve in my role as an educational administrator, so while there will always be novel challenges and new goals to set, some portions of my job have become routine. If I were merely working, I would certainly be able to ramp up the amount of writing that I do, but the lion’s share of my mental and creative energy is devoted to my graduate studies for the time being.
By sheer coincidence, AE, a major outlet for some of the sorts of writing I most enjoy doing, experience an unplanned hiatus in September of 2016, which I will expand on in a separate post. More recently, Care2 has shut down its Causes blogging webzine, so that’s something else off my plate due to outside circumstances.
This happens. Sometimes publications fold or change focus, sometimes it’s the writer whose focus changes, and sometimes it’s both. I used to love writing for The Spectator Tribune, but a particularly hectic period saw me pass on one request after another until I hadn’t taken on a writing assignment for two years. I finally checked in to find the magazine gone defunct. Life is timing.
Likewise now, when a major former client in publishing asked me a few weeks ago if I planned to pick up any future projects or if they should take me out of the payroll system, I elected for the latter. Narrowing my focus is exactly what I need right now. I’m going to make it a purposeful decision rather than dragging it out or leaving anyone hanging.
Oh, I’ll still be writing. Academic papers, school assignments, and my own master’s thesis will make up the bulk of it, and if some of them are published, even if only in some niche research journal, I’ll share. Meanwhile, I expect I can still squeeze in the odd fun pop-culture essay or book review every two or three months, at the WFP or AE.
But if I’m going to get back to pitching to new markets and pushing myself creatively in my writing or simply getting my writing output back up to where it was at or near its peak (and that’s a big if), it will only be after I’ve graduated. It shouldn’t take too long, since I’m putting the necessary time into it.
More stuff from the Free Press from this past year, all fiction. It’s been long enough since I’ve done an update I think it’s worth highlighting a couple. In fact, almost all of these titles come from favourite authors of mine (a couple newbies in there as well), but Death’s End, the final book in the trilogy by Cixin Liu (my new favourite foreign-language writer), is a must-read, along with its predecessors. Seriously, one of the all-time best science fiction trilogies, even in translation. You simply cannot skip it.
Also, Kelly Link, if you haven’t read her, do it. She’s so busy as an editor and rarely releases a collection, but she is one of the great short story writers. Get In Trouble meets the high bar set by her earlier work and I very much enjoyed it.
I don’t know when exactly I realized I was on hiatus from my Care2 Blogging. As the only on-staff freelancer (that is, without a set number of expected weekly posts), I didn’t technically need to ask for leave if I was uninspired or unavailable to pitch and write any stories in a given week. But I certainly didn’t plan to take a three-year break.
This summer I got back to it, with a couple posts a week. Right now that still seems just about right, though I’ve done the odd threefer. Here is a curated selection of some of my favourite recent pieces:
Wildlife Thrives in Korea’s Demilitarized Zone
Equifax’s Data Breach Is a Nightmare. Their Handling of It Is Worse.
I read an interesting study not that long ago on time management for school principals. One of the more interesting, if obvious results, is that you only have so much time in the day. If you’re fully booked and you try to cram in something new, something else will fall by the wayside. It won’t be planned and it won’t be by choice, but you cannot add to a full schedule without losing something, for all your intentions of working just a little bit harder and moving just a little bit faster, we all have our limits.
In my case, I’ve been busy with a number of new roles in my life over the last couple of years:
1) Home renovator: This may not seem like much of an explanation, but I really have poured a metric tonne of time into making this old house as beautiful and functional as it is cozy, and I’ve done the work with great amateurish gusto. It started with tearing down and rebuilding a kitchen entirely from scratch two summers ago, and it just spread from room to room after that. Every vacation, save this past Christmas when my family went to El Salvador, has involved one major or several minor home projects. I pretty much stopped taking major writing contracts starting that summer of 2015, though I may get back on the horse, finally, in the new year.
2) Dad: My son’s impending birth actually provided a motivation as well as a deadline for the new kitchen, which somehow led to the several projects since. I’m on dad duty from the time I get home from work until my two-year-old is down for the night. All my writing has to be done after that, or during nap-time on weekends (if I’m not redoing the bathroom or something, of course).
3) School Principal: I got this job at almost exactly the same time I got the two previous jobs, that same eventful summer. I think I have finally become comfortable (not complacent) in the role, but it’s not a nine-to-five job oftentimes, no matter how much experience you get.
4) Student: This was actually related to role number three, as I took on graduate work in educational administration at night and just finished this past June.
So, after spending most of my time writing school budgets, board reports, research essays, curriculum, and workshop presentations, I am slowly starting to pick up the pace of my public writing again. It’s nice to be back at it.
I haven’t been entirely inactive on that front, and I’ll post some round-ups of my work from the last year or so in the upcoming weeks. But it won’t take long to catch up. I’ve written more academic papers and office emails, by a long shot, than literary reviews, essays, or editorials. Hopefully there will be some quality where I lack quantity.
So what happens after first contact? Leaving aside War of the Worlds scenarios where one race is completely destroyed, after the initial shock, what’s it like five or fifty years into a universe where we know we’re not alone? Human history provides several possible outcomes: ranging from genocide to colonization to occupation to friendship and political alliance to the innocuous missionary outposts or even lone, Marco Polo figure.
Each of these come up in Second Contacts at one point of another, but this is a Canadian anthology . . .
Read my full review at AE.
Link writes magical realism, many-layered tales of complex, fully realized human beings in settings and situations far less constrained to reality than traditional mainstream works. The marriage of literary style and character depth with the surrealist plots and settings traditional to fantasists dates at least as far back as the adjectival German-language writer Franz Kafka.
Read my full review at the Winnipeg Free Press.
I’ve finally gotten around to reading some of A.E. van Vogt’s longer works, specifically, the future fix-up, Empire of the Atom, and the serialized follow-up novel, The Wizard of Linn. This also happens to be the first time AE has covered its Canadian namesake. The full review is here.